Taming Cross-Technology Interference for WiFi and ZigBee Coexistence Networks

Taming Cross-Technology Interference for WiFi and ZigBee Coexistence Networks Recent studies show that WiFi interference has been a major problem for low power urban sensing technology ZigBee networks. Existing approaches for dealing with such interferences often modify either the ZigBee nodes or WiFi nodes. However, massive deployment of ZigBee nodes and uncooperative WiFi users call for innovative cross-technology coexistence without intervening legacy systems. In this work, we investigate the WiFi and ZigBee coexistence when ZigBee is the interested signal. Typically, the duration of transmitting a ZigBee data packet is longer than that of a WiFi packet. Mitigating short duration WiFi interference (called flash) in long duration ZigBee data (called smog) is challenging. To address these challenges, we propose ZIMO: a sink-based MIMO design for harmony coexistence of ZigBee and WiFi networks with the goal of protecting the ZigBee data packets from being interfered by high-power cross-technology signals. The key insight is to properly exploit opportunities resulted from differences between WiFi and ZigBee, and bridge the gap between interested data and cross technology signals. Also, extracting the channel coefficient of WiFi andZigBee will enhance other coexistence technologies such as TIMO [1]. We implement a prototype in GNURadio-USRP N200, and our extensive evaluations under real wireless conditions show that ZIMO can improve ZigBee network throughput up to 1.9, with 1.5 in media, and 1.1 to 1.9 for WiFi network as byproduct in ZigBee signal recovery.